Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most striking features of Classical Indian skepticism is the degree to which it provides intellectual delight.Ethan Mills offers an insightful treatment of each of the three pivotal figures he locates in this tradition, but he also succeeds in conveying that sense of delight, both in his sympathetic depictions of the tradition's great skeptical arguments, and in his own creative interpretations of their significance.There are many points where I find Mills fully persuasive: for example, in his arguments to the effect that we cannot know the precise boundaries of our ignorance, and in his suggestion that skepticism can arise inevitably from an exaggerated emphasis on explicit justification.As a critic, however, I sense a duty to explore the more puzzling aspects of Mills' approach, with the aim of clearing away some ambiguities and gaining a deeper appreciation of what it is that he is proposing.I should acknowledge that I come at the book from an odd angle, as a contemporary epistemologist with no more than an amateur's grasp of the South Asian texts he is discussing.But in saying I read these texts as a contemporary epistemologist, I don't mean to say that I aim to impose my contemporary epistemology upon them, as opposed to letting it be shaped and instructed by them.I certainly agree with Mills that we should not assume that the moves made by Classical Indian skeptics can be neatly captured with the existing vocabulary of contemporary Anglo-American epistemology; indeed, much of the reward for me in looking at these traditions lies in their potential to offer fresh philosophical paths, and correctives to bad habits I have picked up from the traditions in which I was educated, and Mills' book has been eyeopening in that regard.At the heart of the book is a distinction between epistemological skepticism and skepticism about philosophy, motivating the project of reading the three pillars as strictly committed to the latter enterprise.In Mills' framing of the contrast, epistemological skeptics have an agenda which may include advancing arguments ________________________
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".